Mind Your Language!

A couple of weeks ago I received a promotional email from a company I’ve spoken with in the past. The email directed me to their latest blog post.

The title sounded interesting. I thought this could be useful content, so I clicked through.

What greeted me was shocking.

The blog post was littered with poor grammar, spelling mistakes and typos; the tone was hectoring, telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing and treating me like an imbecile.

My immediate impression was “Whoa! Don’t talk to me like that. I’m not going to trust you, or your advice”. The company concerned has lost a potential client.

That’s really not a good start when you’re trying to win over undecided prospects. When your readers reach the conclusion not to trust you, you’re dead in the water. You’ve lost the relationship. And even if your prospects don’t unsubscribe, you’re very unlikely to ever convert someone once they’ve decided they don’t trust you.

Are You Alienating Your Readers?

Content marketing is a useful way of staying in touch with your prospects. It can establish you as an authority in your marketplace, and helps your SEO ranking with the search engines. However, it won’t work if you shoot yourself in the foot as this company did.

There are three types of people reading your posts and emails: 

• Grammar Nazis (well-educated with an abhorrence for errors),
• Normally educated people who will notice the errors, and 
• Those who don’t care or don’t recognise grammar and spelling mistakes. 

If your posts are full of grammar and spelling errors, the grammar Nazis may send you critical emails pointing out all your errors – they’ll never do business with you; the educated prospects will be put off, they may unsubscribe and they are very unlikely to ever become clients; and the ones who don’t care won’t notice – they may become clients despite your poor spelling and grammar. 

How many of your prospects fall into either of the first two camps? If your communications are poor, you could be alienating a huge percentage of your prospect database.

Not taking care over the little things like grammar and spelling gives the impression you are slapdash; that you can’t be bothered to take care over your own communications. If you don’t care about your own work, how can anyone trust you to take care when working with them?

I’m guessing that’s not the impression you want to give!

What Can You Do?

If you are confident your own communications are perfect, then you need do nothing. However, if you have any doubts, there are three possible ways to tackle the potential problems of poor language in your emails and blog posts:

1. Hire a writer to create your blog posts and emails for you. A good copywriter will be able to take your spoken words and explanations, along with additional research, and create engaging, persuasive copy.
2. Hire a copy editor. These are people who can take your draft and fine tune it to iron out poor grammar and catch the spelling errors and rewrite sections where necessary. Again, the end result should be engaging, persuasive copy.
3. If you want to improve your writing without seeking external help, read it aloud. In reading aloud, you have to slow down. You will trip up over areas that are not clear; you’ll hear when your words don’t make sense. This will highlight the areas which need looking at and possibly rewriting – you can then rework the piece so it becomes an engaging, persuasive piece of copy.

Make sure you are not alienating your readers through sloppy use of language. It’s a problem which is easy to address but, unchecked, will be losing you prospects and clients without you ever knowing why.

If you recognise writing is not one of your strengths, give us a call, our in-house copywriter will delight in making sure your communications are conveying the messages you want and not undermining you. Call 01296 737823 and speak to Penny.

Losing clients? Stem the flow

Imagine a nice shiny bucket, steadily filling up with new clients you have been working really hard to attract through a variety of marketing activities. Your goal is to build long term – profitable – client relationships with them. With more clients your growth goals are looking good.

This bucket is every business’ dream.

The reality, however, is that often once those prospects have become clients, they don’t get the same level of attention as prospects. After all it’s really quite exciting to chase that sale and ‘land’ a new client!

As a result, your bucket of clients starts to develop some holes, with clients slowly but steadily leaving you.

There could be several reasons why they might leave, however you mustn’t give them any reason to leave – especially when you consider it costs between 7-15 times more to win a new client than it does to retain an existing client.  

So What Can be Done to Plug the Holes?

•      Measure what business is being lost – the more profitable the business being lost, the sooner you need to stop it leaving

•      What types of clients are being lost – is there a common type of customer that would help to identify what is turning them off?

•      Can you identify the reason why business is being lost? This could include:

-        Bad customer service

-        Missed delivery dates

-        Not keeping in touch with existing customers, which makes them feel ignored and worthless.

-        Products out of stock – lead time doesn’t suit customers / products not available in the customers’ ideal location

-        Payment terms not acceptable to customers / no options for different payment methods & payment terms e.g. monthly instalments vs all up front.

-        Cheaper Competitors

And there are probably others specific to your business. If you can’t easily identify why a certain client left you, call them and ask. And be grateful for the feedback, so you don’t repeat the situation.

•      Analyse your results. What action needs to be taken to address these leaks? Often the action can be implemented immediately to start reducing the amount of business being lost.

•      And it’s important to take this corrective action BEFORE you spend any more money on marketing to attract new customers!

If you need any help understanding why clients are leaving your business and you’re serious about building your business and keeping clients, give us a call on 01296 737823 or visit our website (www.enterprisemarketing.co.uk) to see how we can help.

What will GDPR Mean for your Marketing?

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will become law in the UK on 25th May 2018. This legislation lays down the rules regarding personal data, how you collect it, what you can do with it, and when you may not use it.

The effects of the regulation will be far reaching, and the penalties for non-compliance simply draconian, with fines up to €20,000,000 or 4% of global turnover, whichever is the greater.

A fundamental principle behind GDPR is that “personal data can only be gathered legally, under strict conditions, for a legitimate purpose.”

This has ramifications for how you collect, store and use data about your prospects, clients and staff.

What is Personal Data?

Personal data is anything that can be identified as belonging to a specific individual. This includes name, email address, notes about meetings with that person, details of their spouse and children and any other information you choose to hold about them.

There is also a second level of personal data known as sensitive data. This includes religion, sexual orientation, medical history and similar information.

Collecting Data

Before storing any data about anyone you must ensure you have their express permission to hold and use that data. Even when you’re networking and someone has given you their business card, you cannot just add them to your marketing database without an audit trail to prove they have given you their permission.

Where you have an online sign up form, you must enforce a double opt-in process where an individual gives you their details and your automated system sends them an email to click through to confirm they want to be on your list. The automated system will then be the audit trail to prove consent was given.

GDPR also states that the reason for collecting the data must be clear so that your visitors can give ‘informed consent’ knowing what the data will be used for.

When you send out marketing emails there must be an opt-out option on every single email. This is good practice and you should be doing it already. And that opt-out process must work! I have clicked on opt-out links only to be taken to a ‘404 page not found’ page. Following GDPR this will be considered to be a breach of the regulation.

Right to be Forgotten

While your opt-out clause allows your recipients to opt-out of receiving your marketing emails, the right to be forgotten is more than that. GDPR states that any individual can ask to be ‘forgotten’ by your systems and your company, and you must comply. This means deleting all personal data where that data is a) no longer necessary, or b) the person withdraws consent to processing and there is no legitimate ground for processing. Legitimate grounds could be where someone owes you money and you need to retain their information to follow up and get paid.

Of course, once someone has been ‘forgotten’ by your systems, you will no longer have the information to not target them. This could mean you accidentally target them as a potential new customer in the future. At present, it is not clear whether suppressing the data will be acceptable rather than deletion.

What do YOU Need to do to Prepare for GDPR?

Review your existing data. Where has it come from? Do you have express permission to contact these people? Is the data still up-to-date and valid? And do you have an audit trail to prove you have permission? If you cannot demonstrate that consent has been positively given then you may be open to fines.

Get consent. If your existing data won’t pass the GDPR conditions then consider contacting everyone on your database before 25th May 2018 and ask them to positively confirm their consent. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office “consent cannot be inferred from silence, pre-ticked boxes or inactivity.”

Set up systems for future data collection to ensure explicit consent is given and recorded. Don’t rely on verbal agreement, always put something in writing to the relevant party with the option to opt-out.

How We Can Help

If you have a database of personal data that you haven’t used for a while then it will need data cleansing. We can do this for you, either a simple cleanse to ensure you have the correct address and phone number, and the business is still trading; or a full telemarketing cleanse where we will call everyone on the list to ensure you also have the right contact person at that business.

Call us today on 01296 737823 or visit our website (www.enterprisemarketing.co.uk) for more information.

What’s Your Business Capacity? (and why you need to know)

Knowing your business capacity helps you plan your workload and your marketing activity. That, in turn, will help relieve the small business feast and famine roller coaster of too much work one month and too little the following month.

Do you know what your business capacity is? And what to do about it if you’re not at capacity?

According to Investopedia.com, ‘capacity’ is the maximum level of output that a company can sustain to make a product or provide a service. As an example, a car manufacturing plant could have a capacity of 1000 cars a month. This capacity would not be running the machines at full speed all day, every day. To make a meaningful capacity calculation you need to take account of machine maintenance time, and possible retooling/recalibration time in an industrial setting. You also need to consider the human resources that are needed and allow for sickness and holidays. Capacity is how much work you can get done in a specific time period, with the resources you have available.

With service industries, it is more difficult to determine your capacity as there are no physical quantities to be counted. However, you can get an idea of your capacity through experience. Can you handle 5 client projects a month, or 15 client projects a month? You’ll know how much time an ‘average’ client takes to service and you can estimate how many hours of productive time you have each week or month.

There are overheads in any business; admin tasks that need doing, marketing your business, social media relationship building, prospecting for new clients, and spending time in meetings to land new customers. All these tasks eat in to the time available to do the work and must be considered when calculating your capacity. You also need to take account of the ‘idle’ time when your staff are chatting amongst themselves, catching up after the weekend, going to the bathroom and making cups of tea.

How many productive hours are available each week or each month? And how many ‘average’ client projects will fit into that amount of time? This will give you a rough idea of your business capacity.

Once you have that figure, you will know whether you are working at, or below, capacity. Are your staff finding ‘busy’ work to do because there is not enough client work? Or are you overloaded and trying to run above capacity?

Trying to do too much in too little time is very stressful for everyone. It tends to lead to errors and mistakes which then need correcting. The correcting takes even more time and overloads your capacity even further.

Both under and over capacity situations need to be addressed to ensure your staff are happy and productive, and your business profitable.

What can be done?

If you’re constantly working below capacity, you need to look at your marketing and new business development processes. You need to bring in more business to increase the workload to ‘comfortably busy’.

If you’re working over capacity then you need to consider whether you need to increase staffing levels, or possibly outsource some of your work if that’s possible.

Every situation is different.

And even if you are comfortably working at capacity, are you working with your ideal clients?

There are many different reasons why clients might be less than ideal, and this will be unique to you and your business. Some people work well with detail-oriented clients who want to check every dot and comma, others prefer clients who virtually abdicate responsibility for the end result, and leave it up to you. When you are servicing clients who are less than ideal, they take longer than average to service and cause additional stress to your staff.

If you are working with less than ideal clients, you may want to consider finding more ideal clients and finishing your relationships with those who cause stress and disruption.

Ultimately, you are looking for a happy, productive working environment where everyone is comfortably busy.

What next?

Let us help you.

If you’re running over capacity, we may be able to take on some of your surplus marketing-specific work. If you are working below capacity, we can assist with your marketing to bring in new customers. We can do market research to help you identify your ideal clients and find more of the same.

Visit our website (www.enterprisemarketing.co.uk) or call us today on 01296 737823, to find out more.

Solve your Customers’ Perception of You with Mystery Shopping

I’m sure you’re aware of the term Mystery Shopping, whereby individuals visit shops/restaurants/leisure facilities etc. as a regular customer would, and then report back on various aspects of their experience.

Mystery shopping is commonly linked to retail and other business-to-consumer industries where the relationship between customer service levels and the sales process is widely understood. But, how can the concept of mystery shopping be applied to other businesses, what lessons can be learnt and how can the information be used to help improve your business?

What is Mystery Shopping?

Mystery shopping involves individuals visiting or calling a business to experience the process through the eyes of a prospect or customer. The mystery shopper provides feedback on aspects such as how efficiently processes have been followed, the politeness of staff and how they, as a customer were feeling after the experience.

Why Conduct Mystery Shopping?

Although mystery shopping only provides a snapshot of the customer experience, when used in conjunction with other research such as competitor research it can help clarify where your business is doing well and where it could improve. For example, mystery shopping can help your business to understand:

• How your business is seen by your customers throughout the sales process
• What first impressions are left with potential customers
• The level of service received by customers
• How your customers feel as a result of dealing with your company
• If all members of staff who interact with your customers (at any point in the customer journey) provide the same service levels
• If there are any bottlenecks or delays within the customer pathway that may influence the purchasing decision

How can you conduct Mystery Shopping?

The first step in all research is setting a clear objective so you understand what you are aiming to find out from the research and how you plan to use this information. From this objective, you then need to create a brief and checklist to ensure your mystery shoppers are asking the right questions, have a plausible back story and that their findings can be analysed effectively.

As customer service is a very subjective matter, it is advisable to conduct your research with a number of mystery shoppers and at different times of the day. This will provide a clearer picture and enable you to take into account any personality clashes, personal issues etc. when analysing the results. When using multiple mystery shoppers you can also include a scenario to assess how unhappy customers are dealt with giving a more comprehensive picture.

To truly experience the customer pathway and gain a fair representation of the sales process, it is important that your mystery shopper is treated like any other potential customer. It is therefore imperative that your staff are unaware that the process is taking place as they are likely to adapt their behaviour if they know they are potentially being monitored or reviewed.

During the process, your mystery shopper should act like a normal customer, asking the types of questions that are frequently asked and progressing through the sales process taking into account the objectives of the research. Feedback should be documented as soon as possible after the shopping experience to ensure no details are missed and the experience is fresh.

What do you do with the results?

Having conducted your research, you may be faced with a number of scenarios, with significant implications for how this would affect your potential sales:

• Everything is perfect – All processes are followed efficiently/effectively. The customer is 100% happy and is therefore likely to make the purchase from your business.
• Few areas of improvement are identified – The customer is mostly happy, however there are a few areas where they felt they weren’t being listened to or there were delays in the process. If they experience a better level of service from another company they may be more likely to purchase elsewhere.
• Variety of issues are identified – The customer is left feeling that they haven’t been listened to and/or there have been significant delays in the process meaning they are more than likely to take their business elsewhere.

Any issues identified should be investigated to understand if there is a fundamental issue with the process or whether it is a personnel / training concern. It may be that individuals are simply unaware of the impact their interaction with customers has on the sales process. This can be easily rectified through an employee briefing session focused on improving the customer experience. Alternatively, the research may identify that the processes involved are too complex. By simplifying the process and making it easier for customers to access information your business could instantly improve the customer experience.

Regardless of the outcome, it is important to communicate with all members of staff explaining how and why the research was undertaken, what the results have shown and what steps you are taking to rectify any issues identified. This should all be communicated in generic terms taking care not to single out individual team members. Having made these changes, a follow-up mystery shop should then be completed to assess how these have affected the customer experience.

If you would like to discuss how mystery shopping can help you understand the perceptions your customers have of your business, call us today.  

Karen Munson is Strategic Officer at Enterprise Marketing Solutions and contactable on 01296 695635 or Karen.munson@enterprisemarketing.co.uk. 

How to Achieve … Like Leicester City

At the beginning of the 2015/16 football season who would’ve believed that Leicester City would be crowned the Premier League champions. After all, the odds were certainly against them and they had only narrowly avoided relegation the previous season with a win in the final game of the season.

So how did they manage it and what lessons can your business learn from their success?

There are a number of contributory factors to Leicester City’s success which when applied to your business can help facilitate growth, encourage teamwork and ultimately help your business achieve success.

Strategy

Like business, success in football is pre-dominantly based on identifying a strategy and applying this strategy effectively. This includes the composition of your team, understanding your own strengths/weaknesses plus those of your opposition, and pinpointing and then exploiting any opportunities whilst minimising the threats.

It can be tempting to focus on individuals within your team and build your strategy around their individual strengths rather than looking at the team as a whole. But what happens if that individual leaves or the rest of the team aren’t able to perform effectively within your chosen strategy? By creating a strategy that encompasses the strengths of the whole team the impact of an individual leaving can be minimised and their replacement will be able to fit in to your strategy more easily.

Confidence & Self-belief

Although they had only narrowly avoided relegation in the previous season, Leicester ended that season in strong form, winning 7 of their last 9 games. It would’ve been all too easy for Leicester to focus on the negatives but by focusing on the positive end to the 2014/15 season Leicester began the new 2015/16 season with confidence and were able to continue this form into the season.

Success breeds success, and working in a positive environment that thrives on celebrating success will help promote confidence and self-belief and facilitate further success. Even when things go wrong, there are lessons to be learnt and positives to be taken from the experience.

Teamwork

One of the main headline grabbers throughout Leicester City’s success has been Jamie Vardy, their top goal-scorer, however the contribution made by other members of the squad cannot and should not be overlooked. For example, it doesn’t matter if an individual scores a goal in every match if the defence then concedes 2 goals per match, and it’s important to understand how many players contributed towards the overall outcome of scoring the goal – this could include all 11 players from the team, rather than the final goal scorer.

Each and every person in your team needs to be working effectively together to reach the team or business objective and understand their own contribution to the overall picture. By feeling valued and part of a team effort, individuals will be able to perform to their own strengths in the knowledge that they are being supported by the strengths of other team members.

Consistency

Leicester have maintained a consistent team throughout the season enabling trust to build between the players. They knew how each other played and how to bring the best performance levels out of the different team members which in turn translated to a consistent performance for the fans who began to expect the same week in, week out.

This level of consistency and trust can be brought about within a business through the introduction of processes. By ensuring consistency within your organisation you can manage your customers’ expectations and build levels of trust and brand loyalty by offering consistently high levels of service and/or product quality.

Luck

Finally, it’s fair to say that Leicester have experienced an element of luck in their run to the Premier League title – but a little bit of luck can certainly go a long way!

You may not think these elements have anything to do with marketing however everything here is actually what makes your brand live and breathe – both internally and externally. A clear strategy; a strong, confident identity; great customer service through internal communication, training and processes; consistency for messaging and branded communications – will all give you improved opportunities to win business … which is lucky!

If you would like to discuss how we can help your business succeed, give us a call today.  

Karen Munson is Strategic Officer at Enterprise Marketing Solutions and contactable on 01296 695635 or Karen.,munson@enterprisemarketing.co.uk.

How Digging Reveals Opportunity Treasure

Businesses are all too often caught up in day-to-day operations, ensuring existing customers and enquiries are dealt with effectively and not thinking too far into the future. But what happens when the enquiries stop coming in? Do you know why – is it because the industry has moved on?

What is Desk Research?

Desk research involves collating information from industry reports, articles in media publications, the internet and other sources of information on your chosen area of interest to form a clearer picture.

Why Conduct Desk Research?

There are many reasons why businesses conduct desk research for example:

·         To identify trends in your industry or market sector

·         To understand the current state of your industry and where it is forecast to go

·         To determine where your business fits into that future picture

·         To identify if your business could operate in a different industry or market sector

·        

How can you conduct Desk Research?

As with all market research, it’s important to have a clear objective; an understanding of what you want to find out from the research and how your findings will influence your business moving forward. Having determined your objective there are a number of steps to take:

·         Define your industry / market sector

Although you may be positioned in one particular industry or market sector, there may be other related industries and/or market sectors that will have an influence on your business. For example, a traditional print newspaper publisher will be affected by the online publishing sector.

·         Identify potential sources of information

As previously stated, there are numerous sources of information available, some free of charge whilst others would incur a fee:

·         Mintel Reports

·         Industry publications

·         Industry bodies

·         Thought leaders within your industry

·         Check information for relevance

Having identified potential sources of information, it is then important to check the relevance and authenticity of the data, opinions or facts stated. Any information you find could provide valuable insights for your business but it should be considered in light of the following questions:

·         When was the information published and what dates does it cover?

·         Is the information based on the industry in the UK (or the geographical area you operate in) or is it a more general overview?

·         What sources of information have been used to create the report / article? Are these sources credible?

·         Does the information come from a voice of authority within the industry?

Review Findings

Once you have collated your information from the various sources you can build a picture of the history of your industry from the past through to the present and where it is forecast to go in the future. From these industry forecasts business decisions can be made regarding how to develop your business moving forwards. For example, if your research shows that the industry is forecast to decline in the near future, decisions can be made regarding whether to diversify your business to offer your existing customers something new.

·        Communicate

     Following any research, it is important to communicate with your employees to ensure they are aware of your future business plans. This will reduce the likelihood of employee unrest due to any changes made as a result of the research, especially where these changes have a direct impact on your employees.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you to better understand your industry /market sector through desk research, give us a call today.  

Karen Munson is Strategic Officer at Enterprise Marketing Solutions and contactable on 01296 695635 or Karen.munson@enterprisemarekting.co.uk.